On-premises or cloud: the advantages of a SaaS solution

Buy software or subscribe as a “service” in the cloud? Logistics companies are also asking themselves this question. Even though your own servers ensure independence, cloud solutions have many advantages for companies.

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Having your own server is like having your own water well: At first glance, you are more independent and enjoy more freedom — after all, the well removes dependency on the general water supply. Well owners are spared from outages there.

But this freedom comes at a high price, as your own well must meet high requirements. If the whole family wants to take a shower in the morning and do the dishes at the same time, many liters of water are needed in a short period of time. Because of such load peaks, a powerful water pump is necessary even when it normally only needs to pump a small amount of water. If a single pump is not sufficient to meet demand, an additional investment is required. However, if water consumption decreases because all children move out at once, the expensive investment was superfluous.

While autonomy increases due to a private well, the actual availability of water at the site is often lower than with a central water supply. If a local pump suddenly fails, it can be difficult to get a repair or replacement quickly. No one wants to go without fresh drinking water for days on end! Major water suppliers, on the other hand, have built redundancy into their systems and have emergency procedures and infrastructure in place to resolve water supply issues quickly and around the clock. For this reason, today's factories rarely have their own water supply infrastructure. Instead, they get their water from municipal suppliers. In this example, they represent the cloud and the concept of “software as a service”, or SaaS for short.

THE HIDDEN COSTS OF ON-PREMISES SOLUTIONS

When it comes to deciding between an on-premises solution and SaaS, decision makers often only compare the cost of software licenses with the cost of a service subscription. They overlook the fact that license costs are only a fraction of the total operating costs.

There are also other costs, such as for high-performance servers and their maintenance: For local use of software, companies must provide the necessary hardware infrastructure themselves. In order to achieve an availability level similar to that of cloud data centers, this hardware must be redundant on many levels — this includes servers, hard drives, power supply and more. In addition, robust servers are required for maximum utilization, which makes things uneconomical.

OPERATING COSTS AND CONTINUOUS UPDATES

System operation also costs money — and time. Administrators must constantly monitor operations and apply security patches in good time. In general, they must keep their system software up to date to protect themselves against cyber attacks, for example. For possible failures, additional hardware is also required to regularly save backups. If data is lost, procedures are needed to restore the backup to new hardware.

It gets complicated when it comes to troubleshooting: Companies usually hire various providers to take care of hardware, system operation and application software. Now when a problem occurs and it is not clear whether the system software or the application software is to blame, the analysis becomes a very tedious task involving multiple parties. The limits of responsibility are blurring — when in doubt, it is always the fault of others.

THE BENEFITS OF SAAS AND CLOUD SOLUTIONS

In contrast, with SaaS solutions, companies don't have to worry about hardware, system software, backups, and restores — the SaaS provider takes care of everything. If a problem does arise, customers have a responsible point of contact who they can contact for troubleshooting. For the SaaS provider, troubleshooting and troubleshooting is much easier because all levels of the system are under its control.

The operation of SYNAOS Intralogistics Management Platform Although it is also On-premises possible. But SYNAOS expressly recommends SaaS and operation in the cloud. In addition to the customer benefits mentioned above, there are many more: If more capacity is required quickly, these can simply be added — they are immediately available. It is not necessary to upgrade hardware, nor is it necessary to install software on additional instances. If less capacity is then required again, the subscription volume can simply be reduced again.

EXTREMELY HIGH AVAILABILITY

Established cloud providers such as AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft) or Google guarantee extremely high availability levels of 99.5 to 99.99 percent uptime for their basic cloud services. Even with on-premises hardware, this level is very difficult and expensive to achieve. Because each layer—i.e. operating system, database, and more—entails an additional risk of failure, the same software application is bound to have lower availability when installed and run on-premise than when running in a cloud environment.

The high level of support is also beneficial for customers. After all, SaaS providers are the best experts for their own software — this also applies to SYNAOS, of course. As a result, their 2nd level support typically provides better and more knowledgeable support than internal or contracted general IT support can provide.

There are many advantages to SaaS and cloud solutions, from which customers benefit quickly. In addition, many reservations turn out to be completely unfounded upon closer examination. So before you dig your own well, let SYNAOS advise you — and convince you.

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